Cocaine addiction can make the brain age faster: study

By Alice Clifford via SWNS

Cocaine addiction can make the brain age faster, reveals a new study.

When we find joy in the things we love, regions of our brain are flooded with pleasure-inducing dopamine making us feel happy.

Drugs such as cocaine copy that effect, say scientists, but it hits people 10 times harder.

They said the intense impact of the drug can cause brain cells to alter as biochemical changes occur in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

That part of the brain is involved in decision-making, social behavior, personality expression, self-awareness and inhibitory control.

The changes result in the brain aging fasting than normal.

Researchers studied cryo-preserved brains of 42 deceased male donors.

Half the donors had had cocaine usage disorder (CUD) while the other half had not.

The team found evidence that cells in the Brodmann Area 9, a subregion within the prefrontal cortex, appeared biologically ‘older’ in people with CUD.

This revealed that these cells aged faster than in people who didn’t have a history with cocaine addiction.

The biological age of cells, tissues, and organs can be greater or less than their chronological age, depending on diet, lifestyle, and exposure to disease or harmful environmental factors.

Lead author Dr. Stephanie Witt, a researcher at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany, said: “We detected a trend towards stronger biological aging of the brain in individuals with cocaine use disorder compared to individuals without cocaine use disorder.

“This could be caused by cocaine-related disease processes in the brain, such as inflammation or cell death.

“As biological age estimation is a very recent concept in addiction research and is influenced by many factors, further studies are required to investigate this phenomenon, with larger sample sizes than were possible here.”

The team used patterns of DNA methylation as a measure of the biological age of cells in Brodmann Area 9.

According to the National Cancer Institute: “DNA methylation is a chemical reaction in the body in which a small molecule called a methyl group gets added to DNA, proteins, or other molecules.

“The addition of methyl groups can affect how some molecules act in the body.

“For example, methylation of the DNA sequence of a gene may turn the gene off so it does not make a protein.

“Changes in the methylation patterns of genes or proteins can affect a person’s risk of developing a disease.”

First author Eric Poisel, a Ph.D. student at the same institute, said: “As DNA methylation is an important regulatory mechanism for gene expression, the identified DNA methylation alterations might contribute to functional changes in the human brain and thereby to the associated behavioral aspects of addiction.”

The team also looked at differences in the degree of methylation at 654,448 sites in the human genome to find any more links with the presence or absence of CUD in the life of each donor.

They corrected for differences in the donor’s age, the time since death, the brain pH, and further diseases such as depressive disorder and alcohol use disorder.

They found 17 genomic regions that were more methylated in donors with CUD than in donors without CUD.

However, there were three regions that were less methylated in donors with CUD than in donors without CUD.

Poisel said: “We were surprised that in our network analysis, changes in DNA methylation were especially prominent among genes that regulate the activity of neurons and the connectivity between them.

“Interestingly, differential DNA methylation was related to several transcription factors and proteins with DNA binding domains, which implies direct effects of these DNA methylation changes on gene expression.

“This needs to be followed up in further studies.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.